What Your Competitors’ Online Presence Can Teach You About Digital Marketing

Key Takeaways

• All your competitors’ websites, reviews, and search ranking results can tell you exactly what marketing efforts are working on your local market.
• A competitor research check can also reveal some quick wins that you can start to implement straight away, such as filling in missing pages on your website, writing better page titles, and answering questions that your customers are asking but that nobody has yet.
• Learning from competitors does not mean copying them. Rather, you look for areas where they have fallen short and can offer superior services.

Introduction

Your toughest competitor is also your best free teacher.  The pages that your competition writes, the reviews that they collect, and the keywords that they are ranked for are all clues as to what your target customers are looking for. We use this research as the first step to develop a customized digital marketing plan for businesses competing for customers in the New Jersey market for digital marketing services.

Why Should You Study Your Competitors At All?

Studying competitors is the fastest way to save time and money. Instead of spending time testing new strategies, you can see what already works in your region. In local search, a single analysis of your top competitors often reveals 2-3 simple changes to implement for improved results within a month.

What Can Their Website Tell You?

You can find out a competitor’s offer, their pricing, and the wording they use to sell on their website, specifically on the homepage and top service pages. Are they answering customer questions on their pages? What kind of trust signals are they displaying?

 

What are their calls to action? In most cases, if a competitor is clearly explaining a service that you are not, that is silently losing your business. But you can use that against them and do an even better job explaining it.

What Can Their Website Tell You?

These are honest reviews from real customers, written after they have experienced your competitor’s service. Look for repeat comments that praise your competitor, and other comments that point out shortcomings. That you have opportunities to do things better is very free, because you can win by simply doing something better than they do.

How Do Their Reviews Reveal What Customers Want?

This will give you a good idea of the terms and pages that your competitors are using to drive traffic to their websites. Free tools provide access to your competitors’ search rankings for specific keywords and themes.

For example, three of your competitors are ranking for a question relating to your services, and you have not written a page to answer that question – that’s a post waiting to happen and could be one of the biggest and cheapest opportunities for you in your digital marketing services in New Jersey.

Where Are Your Competitors Winning On Search?

A simple way to look at this is to check which keywords and pages on your competitors’ websites to send them traffic. There are many free tools that allow you to check for this, such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, to name a few. Take note of all of the terms your rivals rank for and the blog post topics that bring traffic to their websites.

 

Note if there are any search gaps – for example, three of your competitors all rank a certain question, and you have no page to answer it. That would be a great place to start with your content. The search gaps and missed opportunities are often the largest and most cost-effective part of any digital marketing services in New Jersey for a business to develop.

How Do You Turn This into a Real Plan?

Turn your notes into a simple list of fixes to implement, ranked by the amount of effort required to implement against the potential gain. Begin with the fix that requires the least amount of effort to implement, most likely a simple missing service page or unanswered question, or even fixing up a weak title tag. Then move on to implement larger efforts, such as creating new content to form a content cluster, or launching a review campaign.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How often should I check my competitors?

Twice a year is a common benchmark for competitor research. But if a competitor launches something, or your rankings tank, you’ll want to revisit this frequently.

 

2. What tools do I need to start?

We recommend starting off with free tools such as Google Search, Google Maps, and your favorite browser. There is also plenty of value to be gained with paid tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, but you can usually learn enough to get started with the free versions first.

 

3. Do I really need an agency for this?

No. It is, however, something that a good SEO agency in New Jersey can complete for you in no time and put together a solid search marketing plan for you.

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, your competitors may have already done much of the groundwork in understanding how to market to your target audience. Your job is to observe what they are doing, learn from their strategies, build upon them, and find ways to do it better. With e intelligence, businesses can use competitive insights and data-driven digital marketing strategies to strengthen their online presence and turn opportunities into real growth for New Jersey businesses.